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Effectiveness of Psychotherapy Analyzed

Mary Lee Smith and Gene Glass conducted an experiment in 1977 to determine if psychotherapy works and which methods are most effective. They collected 375 studies on counseling and psychotherapy, and used meta-analysis to combine the results. They found that psychotherapy was more effective than no treatment, moving clients from the 50th to 75th percentile compared to untreated controls. They concluded that psychotherapy works, some treatment is better than none, and more research is still needed in this developing field.

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Sai Muttavarapu
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131 views2 pages

Effectiveness of Psychotherapy Analyzed

Mary Lee Smith and Gene Glass conducted an experiment in 1977 to determine if psychotherapy works and which methods are most effective. They collected 375 studies on counseling and psychotherapy, and used meta-analysis to combine the results. They found that psychotherapy was more effective than no treatment, moving clients from the 50th to 75th percentile compared to untreated controls. They concluded that psychotherapy works, some treatment is better than none, and more research is still needed in this developing field.

Uploaded by

Sai Muttavarapu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Sai Muttavarapu

Period 4
Experiment Analysis- Choose Your Psychotherapist

At University of Colorado in 1977, Mary Lee Smith and Gene Glass started an

experiment that would hopefully explain questions such as “does psychotherapy

work?” and “Which method works the best for me?” because there are multiple

types of psychotherapy all around the world. There were three goals to this

experiment (1) to identify and collect all studies that tested counseling and

psychotherapy (2) to identify the effect of each therapy and (3) to compare the

effects of different therapies.

Out of 1,000 magazines and journals and books, Mary Lee Smith and Gene

Glass selected 375 studies that tested counseling and psychotherapy. The

researches used meta-analysis developed by Gene Glass that would take individual

studies and merge them into a larger statistical analysis so the data would seem

more meaningful. Most of the tests they researched about was using two-three

groups of subjects and giving each a different type of therapy and one of the groups

may be a control group. The researchers got a lot of the effects of a therapy from all

the studies. The meta-analysis computed 833 effect sizes that included

approximately 25,000 subjects. Their average ages were 22 and they received an

average of 17 hours of therapy from therapists who had an average of 3.5 years of

experience.
Mary Lee Smith and Gene Glass discovered that therapy was more effective

than no treatment. The average client in therapy moved from the 50 th percentile to

the 75th percentile. This means that they are doing better than 75% of all the

untreated controls. Finally, the researchers concluded three things. One is that

psychotherapy works because the meta-analysis supported psychotherapy. The

second was that people under some treatment did far better than people who don’t

have any treatment. Third is that this type of therapy is still undeveloped and not

well researched yet which means this field will get more attention.

This is an important study because is states exactly if psychotherapy is good

or not in a straightforward matter. Psychotherapy is still not widely used by

everyone yet so knowing before it spreads out is better for everyone. I think it’s a

precise and reliable experiment because it used a good chunk of statistics and

information. The result of this study allows us to know if our next step on this field

is right or not.

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